Defund National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is trying to stop the all-important Trump energy dominance agenda. It is long past time for the Trump administration to defund the anti-fossil fuel and anti-nuclear power organization and force it to survive, if it still can, off of the left-wing funders whose agenda it constantly promotes.

Most recently, the NAS teamed up with climate activists at Columbia University to bias federal judges in ongoing climate lawfare.

The NAS allowed Sabin Center staff to author climate information for a chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, a book published by the taxpayer-funded Federal Judicial Center. Nowhere in the manual do they disclose that the Sabin Center is in league with lawyers for blue states and cities suing oil and gas companies for climate change damages.

Red state attorneys general protested to the Federal Judicial Center, and the offending climate chapter was removed. But, in an act of brazen defiance, the NAS posted the manual on its website with the climate chapter included, where it remains today.

This act of NAS perfidy comes on the heels of the organization’s effort last summer to derail the Trump Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to rescind the 2009 Obama EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases — the federal scientific determination serving as the basis for what President Trump has called “the climate hoax.”

On its own (politically inspired) initiative, the NAS hastily assembled a group of climate hoax believers who quickly threw together a partisan report defending the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding. The effort was unique because the NAS usually launches such efforts only at the request of federal agencies, often at congressional direction.

Even during COVID, the NAS refused to undertake a study of the epidemic unless a federal agency requested one. But normal practice was cast aside to save the climate hoax from the Trump administration.

But the NAS has yet to play its last card to block the Trump energy agenda.

President Donald Trump wants to reinvigorate the nuclear power industry. While various actors in the nuclear industry are busy developing exciting new technologies for generating power and managing spent fuel, none of this is likely to go anywhere without significant changes to non-scientific and wildly overprotective radiation safety standards.

Although the EPA and Nuclear Regulatory Commission are responsible for setting those standards, the reality is that the NAS has played a key role in setting and maintaining them for the past 70 years. And although the NAS knows very well that its standards never were science-based in the first place, it has no intention of admitting or participating in any corrective process now that will result in them being made science-based.

Although the National Academy of Sciences was chartered by Congress in 1863 to provide scientific advice to the federal government, the institution has been captured and held by the political left over the decades since World War II.

The NAS began using its power to thwart the nuclear industry starting in the 1950s and to promote the climate hoax since the 1970s. The NAS is technically a private non-profit organization, so neither the President nor Congress can pull the plug on it. But about two-thirds of its revenue comes from federal agencies. That funding should be stopped immediately.

If Congress or federal agencies need scientific advice, they can form and fund federal advisory committees or hire the best consultants at their pleasure. There is no need for a standing institution that has allowed itself to become so perniciously politicized.

Finally, it goes without saying that the Trump administration should also look very hard at the Federal Judicial Center’s budget for next year. What does it say about a taxpayer-funded judicial group, chaired by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that allows two versions of its manual to be distributed despite the controversy? At the very least, the FJC should retract both versions of its manual so that it can be reviewed and corrected by non-partisan experts, rather than climate activist hacks.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.

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